2) Free floating blood. In zero gravity. In an environment that's FULL of delicate and sensitive electronics. With no close-by repair shop. What's the worst that can go wrong? "Hey you remember that paper cut, where a few drops of blood floated off into the ductwork? Yeah well, one of them apparently landed on a control board, and shorted something out, and the other is actually frozen and got sucked into one of our delicate air intake valves, and now our systems are malfunctioning and we have 6 hours to live. Thanks for that."
I'm genuinely curious as to what is special about blood in the situations you described here. Don't the same concerns already exist in every hour of unsuited human space time? Sneezing, sweating, drooling in sleep, errant tiny bits of food and drink that escape during meals. Come to think of it -- does anyone in space wear contact lenses? How do you store/clean/rinse them without "a few drops [floating] off into the ductwork"? Is space like heaven, and there are No Tears Up There? Has no one ever gotten misty-eyed while looking at the big blue marble for the first time? Do people stop shedding skin and hair in zero-g? If you're a woman or have ever lived with a wife/girlfriend you'll probably have an appreciation for how much those long hairs get on everything.
It sounds like maybe the system boards and ductwork and the delicate air intake valves shouldn't be so delicate. With the incredibly banal messiness that comes with organic life, why haven't we already had the one-drop-caused ship malfunctions you describe? Maybe some kind of filtration system is part of the design? If things like SD cards and USB flash drives can regularly be forgotten in jeans pockets and survive the lengthy full immersion and detergents of a clothes washing machine, and still function afterward, surely equipment on a space ship could be hardened against the kind of trivial-cause-leads-to-massive-failure scenario you describe?
Exactly. There's enormous potential applications for something like this on Earth. It's hardly a "dead end" and having additional tools available to us in Zero-G is hardly a bad thing.
If that is the case, what, exactly, is the justification to pay the extra x-hundred-percent more expensive costs to do the testing for a terrestrial application in a non-terrestrial environment?
The order is backwards. It would make more sense both scientifically and financially to develop such technology down here first, where it would receive 99.9999% of its expected use over any reasonable future cost/benefit evaluation window -- we're talking a couple decades at least. THEN you have so much existing knowledge that the process of adapting it to the 0.0001% of the cases which could theoretically occur off-planet 30 years from now is faster and tremendously less costly.
I don't think it's logical to use one single potential benefit in the long-tail of a particular technique's development to justify spending $$$$$ on it today before it has even been brought to market.
Were there any other major quotes? That's the only memorable line I got out of that movie (though it's been a while since I've watched it)
Are you kidding me?!?
JOSHUA: How. ah-bout. a-nice. game. of chess?
DAVID: Maybe....later....now...let's....play....global....thermo...nuclear....war.
DAVID: Is...this...a...game...or...is...it...real...?
JOSHUA: What's the difference?
Dad: [painful crunch]...This corn is raw!
Mom: I know! Isn't it wonderful? It's so crisp!
Dad: Of course it's crisp-- it's RAW!!
Falken: Path - follow path. Gate - opengate throughgate closegate. Last ferry leaves at 5:30 so run run run!
Falken:...and Nature will start over, probably with the bees.
Falken: We're the lucky ones. We'll be spared the horror of survival.
Regular nerd to super-nerd: MR. POTATO HEAD!! MR. POTATO HEAD!!! BACK DOORS ARE NOT SECRETS!!!
And that's just off the cuff. With more time and a few hints I might be able to reconstruct 70% of the dialogue in the whole film. Yes I know, intertubes winnar = real life luser. I'm fully aware... I mean, it's Slashdot, and I have a relatively low UID.;-)
Common house locks can be opened with little training. So-called "secure" locks are even worse, false sense of security. I've seen $1,000 locks be opened with 5 dollars of stuff from Wal-Mart. Same goes for so-called "secure facilities," which have locks that can be bypassed in under 5 minutes.
And tell me more about the security of 10-digit passcodes. So lets go with that password, with a $2,000 dollar laptop could be cracked in about 20 minutes?
Do $2,000 laptops now come equipped with Data The Star Trek Android articulated robotic hands capable of punching thousands of 10-digit guesses per second? Man I need to swing by Fry's on the way home and score some of that tech. I just hope it's not an HP, because I hate the spacing on their keyboards.
Has anybody stopped to ask why terrorists need to get past the TSA?
They can just as easily blow up the queue for the scanner. It would probably do just as much damage in real terms.
I think about this all the time. I fly 3-5 times a year, and so far I have always opted out of the scanner. When this happens, the agents all go about their business while I stand there waiting for the next Feeler to become available -- "Male Assist on lane 3! Male Assist on lane 3!......(two minutes later) Male Assist on lane 3!......(two minutes later) Male Assist on lane 3!.......(repeat)". Typically my (punishment) wait time is between 15-25 minutes while all the other folks walk through nude photobooth. During this interval I am standing in the middle of the screening area right next to the machines and agents and passenger line, and I have had no pre-screening at all other than the ID/boarding pass check at the back of the line. Some whackjob could load up his underclothes and his carry-on bag with enough explosive to destroy the entire checkpoint, and just stand there watching the line, waiting until some family with babies or a big church youth mission group with dozens of bright-eyed photogenic save-the-world kids gets up to the front of the line for maximum psychological impact on the evening news. He'd get the bonus -- regular passengers, high-drama passengers, shutdown all airports nationwide in the panic, as well as destroy tens of millions of dollars worth of body-scanner equipment in that checkpoint.
Incidentally, I've also wondered about that punitive wait time. There have been a couple occasions were it seemed the Feelers were available, but they busied themselves with normal screening procedures for a few extra minutes. The last time I flew it occurred to me that perhaps they do have secret instructions to make anyone who opts for a pat-down wait around long enough for the face-recognition software (or the casino-style camera mounted over the person at the back of the line checking ID/boarding passes) to run your name and picture against a preliminary database.
Metal is not the only threat. Ever used a ceramic knife? I have one in my kitchen and cuts just as well as my sharpest metal knife. How about plastic explosives? All you would need to ignite them is a small cell phone battery (allowed on planes). Locking the cockpit doors only does so much good. Think about coercion, "open the doors or we start killing people." Or, the well-known fact that every lock can be broken with tools as simple as a paper clip or a drill. Before you get started, electronic locks are even more vulnerable, being in the air gives someone a lot of time to brute force a lock that often has a 10-digit numeric combination.
You watch waaaay too many movies my friend.
Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe someone should tell the local bank, gas station, grocery store, and pharmacy that every lock can be broken with paper clips. So, you know, no point in putting locks on doors, because hey, paper clip. And maybe coercion will still work in a post-911 world. Maybe pilots will think, "Yeah, let's just open the cockpit and let the terrorists in here. What's the worst that could happen?" And maybe terrorists managed to sneak on with both a crysknife and some kind of equipment that allows them to simply "brute force" the correct code out of the ten billion possible 10-digit numbers, because being in the air makes that kind of thing go faster somehow.
It's also the only way to keep your karma from going in the toilet if you post something that goes against the prevailing wisdom (and we NEED those kind of posters on topics where groupthink tends to set in).
So what? What has good karma ever gotten anyone?
I've been here for almost 15 years. I have excellent karma. Not sure how my use/enjoyment of the site is any different than if I had crap karma. I guess I do get to meta-mod. Big whoop.
I always read at -1 and load all comments, because I've found that I enjoy the downmodded comments as well. I just scroll past any comments/subthreads which seem irrelevant. I've tried browsing at higher level scores and the conversation gets really herky-jerky really quickly. The total democratization of AC posts and the wildly free-as-in-speech, uh, speech, that takes place here is, for me, one of its essential charms.
I come to Ars more and more Because of the quality of the stories there. I think the Firehose on Slashdot was a bad idea. The editors should pick the stories, not the readers.
Letting the inmates run more and more of the asylum is what killed Kuro5hin too.
Only people foolish enough to think antisec actually cares about being truthful would think that. Lets face the facts here
12 million is a piss in the pond in terms of iOS UDID codes. Its less than half the iPhones sold LAST QUARTER. If the FBI was realistically trying to build a database of them, there is no way at this point they would ONLY have 12 Million.
12 million is more easily explained by being leaked from a developer, as up until half a year ago, developers were using the code to identify individual iPhones for various reasons like automatic sign-in to certain services like some of the multiplayer game services. Apple banned them from using it though half a year ago so at this point there was no reason to keep.
The data it's self was incomplete. Some had legit names and addresses while most were just a ID code. If this was from a official source then there would have been a lot more data on most of these. On the otherhand if it was stolen from a developer who let users opt out of giving their information but used the code for autologin purposes, then there would be clear reason why most of the data has no user info attached.
Antisec is still smarting from getting much of its higher ranking leadership arrested from a FBI plant
So really there is no reason AT ALL to believe antisec's claims that they stole the info. There is however a lot more reason to suspect they were trying to stir the pot in the tech community by stoking already present fears of FBI spying which they did a pretty good job at. It gets clueless script kiddies riled up and makes them look cool. Sure the FBI can be shady, but of the law enforcement agencies out there I would honestly have to say they are the least shady of the bunch and tend to release information without bending the truth too much, even when it has the possibility of embarrassing them. Not saying they ALWAYS do it, just saying they tend to be more forthcoming than other government agencies.
Why do you think that using caps would make your stupid points any more valid?
You need to get over it. It's not like this is a 1993 IRC flamewar with people "SHOUTING". The very very occasional use of caps in that post is quite obviously an attempt by the author to compensate for the lack of inflection and affect in pure text and render the text more conversational. The caps indicate words which in spoken discussion would be given extra emphasis. "Not saying they ALWAYS do it", for example, is the way normal people talk in the normal world which you seem intent on scoring Internet Warrior points by scoffing at. I wonder, when you're in administrative planning sessions at your job, do you commonly listen to people speak and then ask them, "Why do you think that varying your tone and accenting different words in your sentence would make your stupid points any more valid?". Good luck assimilating the other 7 billion people on the planet into your world of preferential monotone.
What I find common in ability/attack panel MMORPGs is the difficulty in distinguishing attack icons from each other. Take the Sith Inquisitor class on Star Wars TOR. Most of the damage attacks are some variation of shooting evil Darkside force energy at your enemies. The icons on the action panel accordingly all feature some kind of hands or body outline either shooting lightning or having lighting swirl around them or something similar. I find that while the icons individually may be sorta cool looking, they are MORE confusing than if you were to replace icons by words like "Shock" "Melee" "Paralyze", or even just "Attack1, Attack2, Attack3, Heal1, Heal2, Heal3...." In the heat of battle, if you are looking to visually process and recognize pictograms before clicking an attack, you are losing valuable fractions of a second you need to activate those powers. It seems to me in these situations most people once they learn the battle mechanics either fall into muscle-memory of keyboard Alt+# Ctrl+# toggles, or the positional memory of "use the attacks in slots 1 and 2 for quick damage, slots 4 and 5 are for immobilize/confuse effects, tray 2 slots 1 and 2 are self-heals, slots 3 and 4 are team heals, tray 3 slots are team buffs" and so on. Does having a designed glyph there really add anything to the game, and might it actually be LESS desirable and less efficient than just accepting the numeric/positional memory and going with a plainer tile set.
It's sad he has to give a General Order to keep his fascists from wielding their clubs against innocent photographers documenting their actions, but I'm glad he has given it.
Repeat after me: "Ye Olde Infernal Steam Engine Machination is not able to harvest wheat and cotton without crushing/destroying the grains. It is extremely unlikely they will ever be able to. The atom is, as its Greek origin indicates, the fundamental building block of all matter in the universe and is indivisible. It is extremely unlikely it will ever be able to be divided, and if it did, the power unleashed is uncontrollable and it is extremely unlikely they will ever be able to control it".
The creative people will keep on being creative because that's what they like to do in their spare time.
So far I've probably put over 100 hours designing a very small and extremely low cost desktop CNC machine. The Mantis requires too many specialized parts that are hard to get outside of the USA and his $100 sticker price does NOT include the motors or electronics. So far, the complete and total BOM for my machine is around $85.
And what happens when the design of that item only takes you 5 hours instead of 100, because you're simply swapping out from among thousands of modular 3D-printable templates available online?
You are greatly underestimating the labor crash that is coming in the next 20 years, unless the captains of industry/law can continue their current attempt to cancel every innovation with a corresponding scarcity-maintaining system of control. We have milions of pages of history texts devoted to wars over scarcity and resource desperation. What we don't yet know is what the Wars of Plenty will look like.
Anyone else notice the very unfortunate freeze-frame placeholder before you start playing the video? Because of where the crawl across the bottom just happens to be, the text on the frame appears at first glance to read as follows:
"WHISTLEBLOWER: GOVT FEARS MESSAGE BUT INSTEAD PROSECUTES MESSENGER
Do you find that the temporal resolution of the video really makes much of a difference in your enjoyment, as a large proportion of commenters seem to indicate?
Currently yes, but I'm willing to allow for the possibility that this is conditioning based on growing up with older technology, like vinyl preservationists.
48fps is awful because the objective of film is NOT to look 'real'. The objective is to create a dream-state.
The dream metaphor for film viewing is one of the most persistent in both classical and modern film theory.
Think about it: Nothing about film is particularly 'real': Sudden cuts, temporal jumps, non-linear sequences. Film doesn't simulate reality, it simulates the dream state. Everything that technology is now doing to 'improve' the cinema experience and make it more 'realistic' is destroying the dream-state of the medium. Movies are getting less absorbing the more 'realistic' they become.
Regular, traditional 24fps gives everything a subconscious dream-like quality. But 48fps makes everything look like television - or worse. It breaks us out of the dream-state.
EXACTLY. Hence my comment about the "reality" of live theatre a few sub-threads above this one. And hence my.sig for the last 13 years on Slashdot.
from what I've read about 48fps, that's exactly the problem people ran into. people said things like "my brain was not processing what I was seeing as 'two hobbits walking up a hill' but rather 'two actors in hobbit costumes walking up a hill'". They were having difficulty suspending disbelief.
They must have a REALLY hard time with live theatre.
Actually yes!
I love human storytelling; I love reading plays; love the art of Theatre; love the techniques and methods of Theatre; love acting and creating and characterization and directing. But I. Hate. Live. Theatre.
Why? Because "it's one actor dressed up like Macbeth pretending to see another actor dressed up like Banquo's ghost, amidst a bunch of other actors dressed up like courtiers who cannot see the actor dressed up like Banquo's ghost".
But I love to watch movies. Can get caught up in movies and so carried away that it's jarring to walk out of the theatre and find myself in a cookie-cutter suburban strip mall.
I am one example of a person who needs the implied cinematic distance to immerse myself in the story. Because that's what it's about for me -- the story. Doesn't matter how crisp the textures or tangible the spray of alien blood looks. It's about that weird mental space when you can be temporarily deceived that what is being shown on the screen in front of you is what's being shown on the screen of your retina. It is the very realism and true 3-D of live theatre which pushes it inevitably out of this space. The stage is only so big, the proscenium and the band and the luxury boxes, or in small venues the proximity to the actors and the rest of the audience..... these are the very things which do not allow me to see a play as anything other than a play. It cannot ever be pure Story for me. And I have been to performances where I was assured by folks who would know, that these were top-notch productions that critics and theatre-lovers rave about.
When it comes to hyperrealism in theatre, I live in the uncanny valley.
In other words, our fascist government just does whatever the hell it wants and no one can do a damn thing about it.
You don't think this is anything new, do you? The federal government has been ignoring court decisions that it doesn't like since at least 1832.
That's not equivalent to what we're seeing on a daily basis in modern times. People bring up crap from history as if it's supposed to make us feel better about today's crap. The difference is that in 1832 POTUSes and SCOTUSes could squabble and play constitutional chicken with each other and it largely had little to no impact on the day to day lives of U.S. citizens, towns, and states. Now that insulating layer of political vacuum between the Federal Government and We The People has been filled in with a million bureaucrats and thousands of agencies, through which they are ALREADY touching your life every moment of every day. People getting upset about a TSA grope is bizarre, since the banal everyday bureaucratic groping reached penetrative levels a few decades ago. Basically, the waters of local control have receded and revealed an enormous land bridge across which the power brokers can wheel their siege towers and catapults and infantry. The people are now under attack and so long as the bureaucratic infrastructure exists, the control freaks will continue to issue forth armies across it. Personally I think this particular war is already over. YHBT YHL HAND.
Indeed. Thinking about things logically and taking autocorrect into account, it seems the ideal layout for a phone would place its letters based on (minimizing) the probabiliy that adjacent letters would appear in a word.
I completely disagree. For example, if "a" and "n" were adjacent, thumb-typing "banana" would be a breeze. Your text keyboard covers made a one to two square inch area in most cases; moving your finger five milimeters in any given direction is easy and actually minimizes mistakes because once oriented to the first correct letter you can more easily make a small adjustment to the next letter than you can lift your thumb and move it an inch to drop down correctly on a far-away letter.. And adjcency is already built into autocorrect functions, so if the letters get slightly jumbled from typing to fast the correct word will still pop up most of the time. Unlike a large mechanical keyboard which covers a full octave of physical space for each hand, the major difficulty in texting isn't moving the fingers to cover the space, it's ensuring the fingers are tapping the correct characters and that the software can easily recognize what should have been the correct characters
Instead, I would say that the ideal layout for a phone would place letters based on a large matrix minimizing the probability that any two adjacent letters could fill in the same location in a word that is otherwise the same. In English, this is a dominant feature of vowels and a huge frustration with UIO in the current layout -- put pot pit, shut shot shit, un on in, lick luck lock, etc. There are consonants which are equally problematic; you definitely don't want "k" and "h" next to each other -- back Bach, muck much, lock Loch, stacked stached,
Probably. Looking cool at Starbucks in front of the other hipsters is an important thing to many purchasers of tablets.
This is an oft-repeated assertion that only reveals YOU are the shallow callow hipster. Because you see there is more hipster than to scoff at something that once was rare and is now growing in popularity.
You see, what you are doing is exactly how your type of hipster spoke about public cell phone use 13 years ago. And no doubt in any technology revolution there is some percentage of early adopters who enjoy the conspicuous consumption aspect. Most of us can probably remember the dude standing in line at the grocery store in 1997 talking loudly into his phone in a way that was clearly attention-seeking. But now 9-year-olds get cell phones as birthday presents and use them to text grandma. There is nothing in that situation that makes anyone look cool. And now no one in the line at the grocery story notices that you are using a personal phone in public, because they're too focused on playing games on their own phone.
The current universal prevalence of cell phones in top economic countries and their continuing growth in countries on lower economic tiers is a result of their utility, not their coolness. Tablets will stand or fall on the very same merits. I think it's pretty obvious that ten years from now everyone will be somehow carrying/wearing a personal computer every bit as powerful as this year's desktops. Public use of tablets (or whatever replaces them) won't look any cooler and status-seeking than ubiquitous cell use is today.
Let me correct the "preposition at the end" problem for you - "...clarity of communications and the perception of competency, are..." - add on ", you fucking asswipe!". There - all better!
The point isn't that people make mistakes or spelling errors or whatever - it's that they don't recognize is grammatically wrong and when it's pointed out to them they either don't care or get angry that you pointed out their mistake. IOW they are not able to admit they made a mistake or unable or unwilling to correct it. And you're pretty sure future mistakes will also happen. They are "proud" of their ignorance and should properly be ridiculed.
Picture a cartesian x-y graph with the y-axis values indicating market share over time (x). Now imagine the line representing Opera's market share. Now re-read the post you're replying to. See what he did there?
Which is a shame, because I've been a hardcore Opera user for over a decade and it has absolutely been the best browser for what I do online.
You are not taking into account, that doctors are wary of using MRI devices for scheduling and expense reasons. An X-ray image from a leased dental device is almost free (less than a hundred euros for private institutions here) and takes mere minutes, while an MRI scan costs thousands of euros and may take hours.
Also, since MRI is more useful in a wider variety of situations, someone else probably needs it more or needs it sooner - you might end up having a huge waiting time to get yourself scanned. It is prudent to take the x-ray, because if the doctor can see the ailment there, the MRI scan may not be needed at all. He will also send you out, because if the pain disappears in a couple of weeks, the MRI won't be necessary. Money, time, work, and possibly lives, might be spared.
If you are worried about the risks of a single x-ray, I assure you that they are beyond neglible - especially if you compare that risk with the possible wasted utility of an MRI device.
Congratulations on your European bankruptcy-headed social democracy. At least everyone drives off the cliff together. That's true solidarity, comrade!
And while at the current moment I am able to obtain an MRI (and most other diagnostic imaging) in the United States of America in less than 48 hours (and often same-day) of visiting my doctor, you can take heart in the fact that those who would like to move us into your continent's bureaucratically-rationed system of health control have won a major victory with the trojan horse legislation known as the Affordable Care Act, which was very carefully designed to destroy the private insurance system and leave a vacuum which will be filled by the virus known as "single-payer" medical care.
So basically, you are saying that you have something to hide?
I invite anyone who claims otherwise to install a permanently on webcam in their bedroom so we can get some nice videos of their pet sheep.
Reality TV gave me this idea; you offer people a great deal. Give them a fantastic TV with access to all the satellite AND cable that they ever want. The catch is that they must have cameras installed in their home and everyone who is part of this program gets access to everyone elses camera feeds. The hook line is: "You will be your own reality TV show!!! YOU WILL BE ON TV!!!!!!111111"
I think this would catch on.
I think it would catch on, too. Because that, in a nutshell, is the Facebook user experience. All you've done is propose it be video-based instead of HTML/CSS.
p>Cheating the system to get elected... no respect for this man now. (Yes I know its not technically cheating the letter of the law, but it flies in the face of a proper democratic election.)
No it doesn't. How would you characterize as "a proper democratic election"? Do such things occur somewhere? What does that fantasy have to do with the internal party politics that determines reality? I LOL in your general direction sir.
What is a caucus? What is a district? What is a precinct? How do precinct chairs get to be chairs? How do state/national party delegates get to be delegates? How do party platform planks get to be platform planks? How did Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed and Don Wildmon and James Dobson take over the Republican Party 30 years ago? How do state legislatures get filled? How do voting precincts/districts get carved up?
The reason the political process in the USA sucks is that people fetishize the act of casting a vote and think that's where the citizenry derive their power. Every time you cast a vote you are simply hitting a toggle switch within a previously constructed system. You are just as free as a pigeon in a Skinner box presented with two levers to peck. No amount of pecking lever 1 over lever 2 will change the structure of the box nor the fact that its creators put you in it.
A true grassroots movement could easily sweep away the crap in the two major parties. But such things don't happen because people are too lazy to get that involved. They'd rather just show up three times a year to vote for whatever's put in front of them. The power goes to those who organize the most. If you show up as a single solitary Paulite to your precinct thinking you're gonna put your little slice of the GOP back on track to "true conservatism" (whatever that means) you will be blindsided by the well-entrenched career powermongers and heavily motivated christianists who have been doing this a lot longer than you and will be using their numerous leftover extra brain cycles to plan dinner and next week's cotillion while they reflexively and casually exploit Robert's Rules of Order style procedures to cut you right out of the process should you try to speak up or add agenda items or nominate yourself as delegate to the your party's larger conventions. They already know ahead of time who is going to be nominated for what positions, who is going to make motions, who is going to second the motions, who is going to call for votes, who is going to move to end the session.... This is settled well in advance. If you're not part of an existing clan, don't enter an advanced open PK-ing MMORPG, because all that happens is that YHBPKed YHL HTH HAND.
Slashdot Mirror
2) Free floating blood. In zero gravity. In an environment that's FULL of delicate and sensitive electronics. With no close-by repair shop. What's the worst that can go wrong? "Hey you remember that paper cut, where a few drops of blood floated off into the ductwork? Yeah well, one of them apparently landed on a control board, and shorted something out, and the other is actually frozen and got sucked into one of our delicate air intake valves, and now our systems are malfunctioning and we have 6 hours to live. Thanks for that."
I'm genuinely curious as to what is special about blood in the situations you described here. Don't the same concerns already exist in every hour of unsuited human space time? Sneezing, sweating, drooling in sleep, errant tiny bits of food and drink that escape during meals. Come to think of it -- does anyone in space wear contact lenses? How do you store/clean/rinse them without "a few drops [floating] off into the ductwork"? Is space like heaven, and there are No Tears Up There? Has no one ever gotten misty-eyed while looking at the big blue marble for the first time? Do people stop shedding skin and hair in zero-g? If you're a woman or have ever lived with a wife/girlfriend you'll probably have an appreciation for how much those long hairs get on everything.
It sounds like maybe the system boards and ductwork and the delicate air intake valves shouldn't be so delicate. With the incredibly banal messiness that comes with organic life, why haven't we already had the one-drop-caused ship malfunctions you describe? Maybe some kind of filtration system is part of the design? If things like SD cards and USB flash drives can regularly be forgotten in jeans pockets and survive the lengthy full immersion and detergents of a clothes washing machine, and still function afterward, surely equipment on a space ship could be hardened against the kind of trivial-cause-leads-to-massive-failure scenario you describe?
Exactly. There's enormous potential applications for something like this on Earth. It's hardly a "dead end" and having additional tools available to us in Zero-G is hardly a bad thing.
If that is the case, what, exactly, is the justification to pay the extra x-hundred-percent more expensive costs to do the testing for a terrestrial application in a non-terrestrial environment?
The order is backwards. It would make more sense both scientifically and financially to develop such technology down here first, where it would receive 99.9999% of its expected use over any reasonable future cost/benefit evaluation window -- we're talking a couple decades at least. THEN you have so much existing knowledge that the process of adapting it to the 0.0001% of the cases which could theoretically occur off-planet 30 years from now is faster and tremendously less costly.
I don't think it's logical to use one single potential benefit in the long-tail of a particular technique's development to justify spending $$$$$ on it today before it has even been brought to market.
Were there any other major quotes? That's the only memorable line I got out of that movie (though it's been a while since I've watched it)
Are you kidding me?!?
JOSHUA: How. ah-bout. a-nice. game. of chess?
DAVID: Maybe....later....now...let's....play....global....thermo...nuclear....war.
DAVID: Is...this...a...game...or...is...it...real...?
JOSHUA: What's the difference?
Dad: [painful crunch] ...This corn is raw!
Mom: I know! Isn't it wonderful? It's so crisp!
Dad: Of course it's crisp-- it's RAW!!
Falken: Path - follow path. Gate - opengate throughgate closegate. Last ferry leaves at 5:30 so run run run!
Falken: ...and Nature will start over, probably with the bees.
Falken: We're the lucky ones. We'll be spared the horror of survival.
Regular nerd to super-nerd: MR. POTATO HEAD!! MR. POTATO HEAD!!! BACK DOORS ARE NOT SECRETS!!!
And that's just off the cuff. With more time and a few hints I might be able to reconstruct 70% of the dialogue in the whole film. ;-)
Yes I know, intertubes winnar = real life luser. I'm fully aware... I mean, it's Slashdot, and I have a relatively low UID.
Common house locks can be opened with little training. So-called "secure" locks are even worse, false sense of security. I've seen $1,000 locks be opened with 5 dollars of stuff from Wal-Mart. Same goes for so-called "secure facilities," which have locks that can be bypassed in under 5 minutes.
And tell me more about the security of 10-digit passcodes. So lets go with that password, with a $2,000 dollar laptop could be cracked in about 20 minutes?
Do $2,000 laptops now come equipped with Data The Star Trek Android articulated robotic hands capable of punching thousands of 10-digit guesses per second? Man I need to swing by Fry's on the way home and score some of that tech. I just hope it's not an HP, because I hate the spacing on their keyboards.
Has anybody stopped to ask why terrorists need to get past the TSA?
They can just as easily blow up the queue for the scanner. It would probably do just as much damage in real terms.
I think about this all the time. I fly 3-5 times a year, and so far I have always opted out of the scanner. When this happens, the agents all go about their business while I stand there waiting for the next Feeler to become available -- "Male Assist on lane 3! Male Assist on lane 3!......(two minutes later) Male Assist on lane 3!......(two minutes later) Male Assist on lane 3!.......(repeat)". Typically my (punishment) wait time is between 15-25 minutes while all the other folks walk through nude photobooth. During this interval I am standing in the middle of the screening area right next to the machines and agents and passenger line, and I have had no pre-screening at all other than the ID/boarding pass check at the back of the line. Some whackjob could load up his underclothes and his carry-on bag with enough explosive to destroy the entire checkpoint, and just stand there watching the line, waiting until some family with babies or a big church youth mission group with dozens of bright-eyed photogenic save-the-world kids gets up to the front of the line for maximum psychological impact on the evening news. He'd get the bonus -- regular passengers, high-drama passengers, shutdown all airports nationwide in the panic, as well as destroy tens of millions of dollars worth of body-scanner equipment in that checkpoint.
Incidentally, I've also wondered about that punitive wait time. There have been a couple occasions were it seemed the Feelers were available, but they busied themselves with normal screening procedures for a few extra minutes. The last time I flew it occurred to me that perhaps they do have secret instructions to make anyone who opts for a pat-down wait around long enough for the face-recognition software (or the casino-style camera mounted over the person at the back of the line checking ID/boarding passes) to run your name and picture against a preliminary database.
You're crazy.
Metal is not the only threat. Ever used a ceramic knife? I have one in my kitchen and cuts just as well as my sharpest metal knife. How about plastic explosives? All you would need to ignite them is a small cell phone battery (allowed on planes). Locking the cockpit doors only does so much good. Think about coercion, "open the doors or we start killing people." Or, the well-known fact that every lock can be broken with tools as simple as a paper clip or a drill. Before you get started, electronic locks are even more vulnerable, being in the air gives someone a lot of time to brute force a lock that often has a 10-digit numeric combination.
You watch waaaay too many movies my friend.
Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe someone should tell the local bank, gas station, grocery store, and pharmacy that every lock can be broken with paper clips. So, you know, no point in putting locks on doors, because hey, paper clip. And maybe coercion will still work in a post-911 world. Maybe pilots will think, "Yeah, let's just open the cockpit and let the terrorists in here. What's the worst that could happen?" And maybe terrorists managed to sneak on with both a crysknife and some kind of equipment that allows them to simply "brute force" the correct code out of the ten billion possible 10-digit numbers, because being in the air makes that kind of thing go faster somehow.
It's also the only way to keep your karma from going in the toilet if you post something that goes against the prevailing wisdom (and we NEED those kind of posters on topics where groupthink tends to set in).
So what? What has good karma ever gotten anyone?
I've been here for almost 15 years. I have excellent karma. Not sure how my use/enjoyment of the site is any different than if I had crap karma. I guess I do get to meta-mod. Big whoop.
I always read at -1 and load all comments, because I've found that I enjoy the downmodded comments as well. I just scroll past any comments/subthreads which seem irrelevant. I've tried browsing at higher level scores and the conversation gets really herky-jerky really quickly. The total democratization of AC posts and the wildly free-as-in-speech, uh, speech, that takes place here is, for me, one of its essential charms.
I come to Ars more and more Because of the quality of the stories there. I think the Firehose on Slashdot was a bad idea. The editors should pick the stories, not the readers.
Letting the inmates run more and more of the asylum is what killed Kuro5hin too.
Only people foolish enough to think antisec actually cares about being truthful would think that. Lets face the facts here
12 million is a piss in the pond in terms of iOS UDID codes. Its less than half the iPhones sold LAST QUARTER. If the FBI was realistically trying to build a database of them, there is no way at this point they would ONLY have 12 Million.
12 million is more easily explained by being leaked from a developer, as up until half a year ago, developers were using the code to identify individual iPhones for various reasons like automatic sign-in to certain services like some of the multiplayer game services. Apple banned them from using it though half a year ago so at this point there was no reason to keep.
The data it's self was incomplete. Some had legit names and addresses while most were just a ID code. If this was from a official source then there would have been a lot more data on most of these. On the otherhand if it was stolen from a developer who let users opt out of giving their information but used the code for autologin purposes, then there would be clear reason why most of the data has no user info attached.
Antisec is still smarting from getting much of its higher ranking leadership arrested from a FBI plant
So really there is no reason AT ALL to believe antisec's claims that they stole the info. There is however a lot more reason to suspect they were trying to stir the pot in the tech community by stoking already present fears of FBI spying which they did a pretty good job at. It gets clueless script kiddies riled up and makes them look cool. Sure the FBI can be shady, but of the law enforcement agencies out there I would honestly have to say they are the least shady of the bunch and tend to release information without bending the truth too much, even when it has the possibility of embarrassing them. Not saying they ALWAYS do it, just saying they tend to be more forthcoming than other government agencies.
Why do you think that using caps would make your stupid points any more valid?
You need to get over it. It's not like this is a 1993 IRC flamewar with people "SHOUTING". The very very occasional use of caps in that post is quite obviously an attempt by the author to compensate for the lack of inflection and affect in pure text and render the text more conversational. The caps indicate words which in spoken discussion would be given extra emphasis. "Not saying they ALWAYS do it", for example, is the way normal people talk in the normal world which you seem intent on scoring Internet Warrior points by scoffing at. I wonder, when you're in administrative planning sessions at your job, do you commonly listen to people speak and then ask them, "Why do you think that varying your tone and accenting different words in your sentence would make your stupid points any more valid?". Good luck assimilating the other 7 billion people on the planet into your world of preferential monotone.
What I find common in ability/attack panel MMORPGs is the difficulty in distinguishing attack icons from each other. Take the Sith Inquisitor class on Star Wars TOR. Most of the damage attacks are some variation of shooting evil Darkside force energy at your enemies. The icons on the action panel accordingly all feature some kind of hands or body outline either shooting lightning or having lighting swirl around them or something similar. I find that while the icons individually may be sorta cool looking, they are MORE confusing than if you were to replace icons by words like "Shock" "Melee" "Paralyze", or even just "Attack1, Attack2, Attack3, Heal1, Heal2, Heal3...." In the heat of battle, if you are looking to visually process and recognize pictograms before clicking an attack, you are losing valuable fractions of a second you need to activate those powers. It seems to me in these situations most people once they learn the battle mechanics either fall into muscle-memory of keyboard Alt+# Ctrl+# toggles, or the positional memory of "use the attacks in slots 1 and 2 for quick damage, slots 4 and 5 are for immobilize/confuse effects, tray 2 slots 1 and 2 are self-heals, slots 3 and 4 are team heals, tray 3 slots are team buffs" and so on. Does having a designed glyph there really add anything to the game, and might it actually be LESS desirable and less efficient than just accepting the numeric/positional memory and going with a plainer tile set.
It's sad he has to give a General Order to keep his fascists from wielding their clubs against innocent photographers documenting their actions, but I'm glad he has given it.
He who?
Knee-jerk comment is knee-jerk.
Repeat after me: "Ye Olde Infernal Steam Engine Machination is not able to harvest wheat and cotton without crushing/destroying the grains. It is extremely unlikely they will ever be able to. The atom is, as its Greek origin indicates, the fundamental building block of all matter in the universe and is indivisible. It is extremely unlikely it will ever be able to be divided, and if it did, the power unleashed is uncontrollable and it is extremely unlikely they will ever be able to control it".
The creative people will keep on being creative because that's what they like to do in their spare time.
So far I've probably put over 100 hours designing a very small and extremely low cost desktop CNC machine. The Mantis requires too many specialized parts that are hard to get outside of the USA and his $100 sticker price does NOT include the motors or electronics. So far, the complete and total BOM for my machine is around $85.
And what happens when the design of that item only takes you 5 hours instead of 100, because you're simply swapping out from among thousands of modular 3D-printable templates available online?
You are greatly underestimating the labor crash that is coming in the next 20 years, unless the captains of industry/law can continue their current attempt to cancel every innovation with a corresponding scarcity-maintaining system of control. We have milions of pages of history texts devoted to wars over scarcity and resource desperation. What we don't yet know is what the Wars of Plenty will look like.
Anyone else notice the very unfortunate freeze-frame placeholder before you start playing the video?
Because of where the crawl across the bottom just happens to be, the text on the frame appears at first glance to read as follows:
"WHISTLEBLOWER: GOVT FEARS MESSAGE
BUT INSTEAD PROSECUTES MESSENGER
IT'S BEHIND BOMBING THAT KILLED 6 U.S. TROOPS"
Do you find that the temporal resolution of the video really makes much of a difference in your enjoyment, as a large proportion of commenters seem to indicate?
Currently yes, but I'm willing to allow for the possibility that this is conditioning based on growing up with older technology, like vinyl preservationists.
48fps is awful because the objective of film is NOT to look 'real'. The objective is to create a dream-state.
The dream metaphor for film viewing is one of the most persistent in both classical and modern film theory.
Think about it: Nothing about film is particularly 'real': Sudden cuts, temporal jumps, non-linear sequences. Film doesn't simulate reality, it simulates the dream state. Everything that technology is now doing to 'improve' the cinema experience and make it more 'realistic' is destroying the dream-state of the medium. Movies are getting less absorbing the more 'realistic' they become.
Regular, traditional 24fps gives everything a subconscious dream-like quality. But 48fps makes everything look like television - or worse. It breaks us out of the dream-state.
EXACTLY. .sig for the last 13 years on Slashdot.
Hence my comment about the "reality" of live theatre a few sub-threads above this one.
And hence my
from what I've read about 48fps, that's exactly the problem people ran into. people said things like "my brain was not processing what I was seeing as 'two hobbits walking up a hill' but rather 'two actors in hobbit costumes walking up a hill'". They were having difficulty suspending disbelief.
They must have a REALLY hard time with live theatre.
Actually yes!
I love human storytelling; I love reading plays; love the art of Theatre; love the techniques and methods of Theatre; love acting and creating and characterization and directing. But I. Hate. Live. Theatre.
Why? Because "it's one actor dressed up like Macbeth pretending to see another actor dressed up like Banquo's ghost, amidst a bunch of other actors dressed up like courtiers who cannot see the actor dressed up like Banquo's ghost".
But I love to watch movies. Can get caught up in movies and so carried away that it's jarring to walk out of the theatre and find myself in a cookie-cutter suburban strip mall.
I am one example of a person who needs the implied cinematic distance to immerse myself in the story. Because that's what it's about for me -- the story. Doesn't matter how crisp the textures or tangible the spray of alien blood looks. It's about that weird mental space when you can be temporarily deceived that what is being shown on the screen in front of you is what's being shown on the screen of your retina. It is the very realism and true 3-D of live theatre which pushes it inevitably out of this space. The stage is only so big, the proscenium and the band and the luxury boxes, or in small venues the proximity to the actors and the rest of the audience..... these are the very things which do not allow me to see a play as anything other than a play. It cannot ever be pure Story for me. And I have been to performances where I was assured by folks who would know, that these were top-notch productions that critics and theatre-lovers rave about.
When it comes to hyperrealism in theatre, I live in the uncanny valley.
In other words, our fascist government just does whatever the hell it wants and no one can do a damn thing about it.
You don't think this is anything new, do you? The federal government has been ignoring court decisions that it doesn't like since at least 1832.
That's not equivalent to what we're seeing on a daily basis in modern times. People bring up crap from history as if it's supposed to make us feel better about today's crap. The difference is that in 1832 POTUSes and SCOTUSes could squabble and play constitutional chicken with each other and it largely had little to no impact on the day to day lives of U.S. citizens, towns, and states. Now that insulating layer of political vacuum between the Federal Government and We The People has been filled in with a million bureaucrats and thousands of agencies, through which they are ALREADY touching your life every moment of every day. People getting upset about a TSA grope is bizarre, since the banal everyday bureaucratic groping reached penetrative levels a few decades ago. Basically, the waters of local control have receded and revealed an enormous land bridge across which the power brokers can wheel their siege towers and catapults and infantry. The people are now under attack and so long as the bureaucratic infrastructure exists, the control freaks will continue to issue forth armies across it. Personally I think this particular war is already over. YHBT YHL HAND.
Indeed. Thinking about things logically and taking autocorrect into account, it seems the ideal layout for a phone would place its letters based on (minimizing) the probabiliy that adjacent letters would appear in a word.
I completely disagree. For example, if "a" and "n" were adjacent, thumb-typing "banana" would be a breeze. Your text keyboard covers made a one to two square inch area in most cases; moving your finger five milimeters in any given direction is easy and actually minimizes mistakes because once oriented to the first correct letter you can more easily make a small adjustment to the next letter than you can lift your thumb and move it an inch to drop down correctly on a far-away letter.. And adjcency is already built into autocorrect functions, so if the letters get slightly jumbled from typing to fast the correct word will still pop up most of the time. Unlike a large mechanical keyboard which covers a full octave of physical space for each hand, the major difficulty in texting isn't moving the fingers to cover the space, it's ensuring the fingers are tapping the correct characters and that the software can easily recognize what should have been the correct characters
Instead, I would say that the ideal layout for a phone would place letters based on a large matrix minimizing the probability that any two adjacent letters could fill in the same location in a word that is otherwise the same. In English, this is a dominant feature of vowels and a huge frustration with UIO in the current layout -- put pot pit, shut shot shit, un on in, lick luck lock, etc. There are consonants which are equally problematic; you definitely don't want "k" and "h" next to each other -- back Bach, muck much, lock Loch, stacked stached,
Probably. Looking cool at Starbucks in front of the other hipsters is an important thing to many purchasers of tablets.
This is an oft-repeated assertion that only reveals YOU are the shallow callow hipster. Because you see there is more hipster than to scoff at something that once was rare and is now growing in popularity.
You see, what you are doing is exactly how your type of hipster spoke about public cell phone use 13 years ago. And no doubt in any technology revolution there is some percentage of early adopters who enjoy the conspicuous consumption aspect. Most of us can probably remember the dude standing in line at the grocery store in 1997 talking loudly into his phone in a way that was clearly attention-seeking. But now 9-year-olds get cell phones as birthday presents and use them to text grandma. There is nothing in that situation that makes anyone look cool. And now no one in the line at the grocery story notices that you are using a personal phone in public, because they're too focused on playing games on their own phone.
The current universal prevalence of cell phones in top economic countries and their continuing growth in countries on lower economic tiers is a result of their utility, not their coolness. Tablets will stand or fall on the very same merits. I think it's pretty obvious that ten years from now everyone will be somehow carrying/wearing a personal computer every bit as powerful as this year's desktops. Public use of tablets (or whatever replaces them) won't look any cooler and status-seeking than ubiquitous cell use is today.
Let me correct the "preposition at the end" problem for you - "...clarity of communications and the perception of competency, are..." - add on ", you fucking asswipe!". There - all better!
The point isn't that people make mistakes or spelling errors or whatever - it's that they don't recognize is grammatically wrong and when it's pointed out to them they either don't care or get angry that you pointed out their mistake. IOW they are not able to admit they made a mistake or unable or unwilling to correct it. And you're pretty sure future mistakes will also happen. They are "proud" of their ignorance and should properly be ridiculed.
Since when is "are" a preposition?
Picture a cartesian x-y graph with the y-axis values indicating market share over time (x).
Now imagine the line representing Opera's market share.
Now re-read the post you're replying to.
See what he did there?
Which is a shame, because I've been a hardcore Opera user for over a decade and it has absolutely been the best browser for what I do online.
You are not taking into account, that doctors are wary of using MRI devices for scheduling and expense reasons. An X-ray image from a leased dental device is almost free (less than a hundred euros for private institutions here) and takes mere minutes, while an MRI scan costs thousands of euros and may take hours.
Also, since MRI is more useful in a wider variety of situations, someone else probably needs it more or needs it sooner - you might end up having a huge waiting time to get yourself scanned. It is prudent to take the x-ray, because if the doctor can see the ailment there, the MRI scan may not be needed at all. He will also send you out, because if the pain disappears in a couple of weeks, the MRI won't be necessary. Money, time, work, and possibly lives, might be spared.
If you are worried about the risks of a single x-ray, I assure you that they are beyond neglible - especially if you compare that risk with the possible wasted utility of an MRI device.
Congratulations on your European bankruptcy-headed social democracy. At least everyone drives off the cliff together. That's true solidarity, comrade!
And while at the current moment I am able to obtain an MRI (and most other diagnostic imaging) in the United States of America in less than 48 hours (and often same-day) of visiting my doctor, you can take heart in the fact that those who would like to move us into your continent's bureaucratically-rationed system of health control have won a major victory with the trojan horse legislation known as the Affordable Care Act, which was very carefully designed to destroy the private insurance system and leave a vacuum which will be filled by the virus known as "single-payer" medical care.
So basically, you are saying that you have something to hide?
I invite anyone who claims otherwise to install a permanently on webcam in their bedroom so we can get some nice videos of their pet sheep.
Reality TV gave me this idea; you offer people a great deal. Give them a fantastic TV with access to all the satellite AND cable that they ever want. The catch is that they must have cameras installed in their home and everyone who is part of this program gets access to everyone elses camera feeds. The hook line is: "You will be your own reality TV show!!! YOU WILL BE ON TV!!!!!!111111"
I think this would catch on.
I think it would catch on, too. Because that, in a nutshell, is the Facebook user experience. All you've done is propose it be video-based instead of HTML/CSS.
p>Cheating the system to get elected... no respect for this man now. (Yes I know its not technically cheating the letter of the law, but it flies in the face of a proper democratic election.)
No it doesn't.
How would you characterize as "a proper democratic election"? Do such things occur somewhere? What does that fantasy have to do with the internal party politics that determines reality?
I LOL in your general direction sir.
What is a caucus?
What is a district?
What is a precinct?
How do precinct chairs get to be chairs?
How do state/national party delegates get to be delegates?
How do party platform planks get to be platform planks?
How did Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed and Don Wildmon and James Dobson take over the Republican Party 30 years ago?
How do state legislatures get filled?
How do voting precincts/districts get carved up?
The reason the political process in the USA sucks is that people fetishize the act of casting a vote and think that's where the citizenry derive their power.
Every time you cast a vote you are simply hitting a toggle switch within a previously constructed system. You are just as free as a pigeon in a Skinner box presented with two levers to peck. No amount of pecking lever 1 over lever 2 will change the structure of the box nor the fact that its creators put you in it.
A true grassroots movement could easily sweep away the crap in the two major parties. But such things don't happen because people are too lazy to get that involved. They'd rather just show up three times a year to vote for whatever's put in front of them. The power goes to those who organize the most. If you show up as a single solitary Paulite to your precinct thinking you're gonna put your little slice of the GOP back on track to "true conservatism" (whatever that means) you will be blindsided by the well-entrenched career powermongers and heavily motivated christianists who have been doing this a lot longer than you and will be using their numerous leftover extra brain cycles to plan dinner and next week's cotillion while they reflexively and casually exploit Robert's Rules of Order style procedures to cut you right out of the process should you try to speak up or add agenda items or nominate yourself as delegate to the your party's larger conventions. They already know ahead of time who is going to be nominated for what positions, who is going to make motions, who is going to second the motions, who is going to call for votes, who is going to move to end the session.... This is settled well in advance. If you're not part of an existing clan, don't enter an advanced open PK-ing MMORPG, because all that happens is that YHBPKed YHL HTH HAND.